K’taka: Just 10 months to go for polls but no party has a clear edge

With less than a year to go for the Karnataka Assembly elections, the political scene in the state has never looked so hazy as now with none of the three major political parties-the BJP, Congress or Janata Dal(S) looking like they would be blessed by voters with a term in office in 2023.

The last Assembly polls were held on May 12, 2018 and the counting of votes was taken up on May 15 with the BJP emerging as the largest party with 104 seats followed by the Congress with 80 and the JD(S), a distant third with 37 seats.

The hot-potch coalition cooked up by the Congress and JD(S) with HD Deve Gowda’s son Kumaraswamy as chief minister did not survive because of a series of wranglings which ensured the government did not last beyond a year with the BJP engineering a series of defections from the Congress and JD(S) to topple Kumaraswamy. The old BJP warhorse, BS Yediyurappa was soon back in the saddle with a clear majority now and was replaced by Basavaraj Bommai in 2021.

The events leading to a poll play an important role in determining voter choices and there were enough indicators in 2018 that then CM Siddaramaiah was unlikely to make a return to power.
For one, the Lingayat-Veerashaiva row over the religion tag was supposed to be a ploy by the Congress to get the dominant community in Karnataka on its side but it never happened. The Congress continued to be in the bad books of the Lingayats who voted en masse for the BJP.
There were other controversies too which marred Congress’ prospects like the DySP Ganapathi suicide and the Hublot watch controversy. And most important of all, the BJP’s mascot, Yediyurappa, whom the party had sorely missed in 2013 after he split away to form his own party, the KJP, was back in the saffron fold, eyeing another term as CM.

The whirlwind campaigns by PM Narendra Modi in the party’s southern citadel, also played a role in getting the BJP its 104 seats.

So what are the determining factors which will weigh on voters’ minds as they trudge to the polling booths in 2023? Does Karnataka or its capital, Bengaluru look any different from what it was in 2018 when the pandemic was yet to strike? Are people happier than what they were when Siddaramaiah was CM, earning bouquets and the occasional brickbat for his series of bhagyas including Anna Bhagya and the subsidized Indira Canteen meals?

At that time, farmer suicides, the Hindutva wave in the coastal districts and the Modi-Shah juggernaut severely depleted the Congress vote bank ensuring they would not be able to return to power on their own. Modi and Shah remain as powerful as ever now while community polarisation has grown ever more sharper, driving the minorities into the lap of the Congress and JD(S).

Compared to 2018, new polarising issues such as hijab, halal meat row and the Muslim trader ban near temples have sprung up dividing the two bigger communities like never before. The Christian community too has drifted away from the BJP because of the anti-conversion bill and a series of attacks on churches and minority institutions.

The capital city, Bengaluru, considered the proud hub of the IT industry in the country, continues to reel from a series of infrastructure bottlenecks which include abysmally poor roads, bad drains, fluctuating power supply and mobility issues. Metro, flyover and underpass projects keep missing their deadlines leaving the city in a mess and reducing traffic movement to a snail’s pace. There has even been talk of the booming IT and BT industry shifting shop to neighbouring Telangana or Tamil Nadu, prodded by politicians of those states who maintain an eagle’s eye on Bengaluru’s sliding infrastructure.
Is the lot of the farming community any better? The cost of cultivation has become exorbitantly high because of the rates of seeds, pesticides and fertilisers while prices of the produce in the market keep fluctuating forcing agriculturists to face unpredictable losses. Most farmers are forced to borrow from money-lenders at high-interest rates and get into a vicious loan cycle. To add to their problems, variations in the monsoon in a largely rain-fed state lead to loss of crop with unseasonal rains turning destructive.

The pandemic has wrought wide-spread havoc with lives and livelihoods lost. With the recent drop in Covid cases, a semblance of normalcy is slowly returning to the state but it will take years for people to return to the good times when Covid was unheard of.

How will all these impact the fortunes of the Bommai government is the question political analysts are asking. The former home minister in the Yediyurappa government is no pan-Karnataka leader though he has an acumen for the finer points of administration having being in government for so many years. Governing a state in the best manner possible is one thing but leadi